The present invention relates in general to multi-agent systems and more particularly to a system for taking into account the Quality of Service (QoS) of a bidder agent when quantifying the value of a bid for providing services.
Telecommunication systems have recently been designed for providing a variety of real-time services and features in an open distributed environment through the collaboration of a set of software components called agents. Such multi-agent systems are designed in such a way that they may adapt and evolve in the face of changing environments. One such multi-agent system is known as MANA (Multi-Agent Architecture for Networking Applications) developed by Mitel Corporation. Through the use of a distributed agent architecture, the system meets high reliability levels and adapts to accommodate technological or service evolution. To achieve these goals, intelligence or learning mechanisms are provided to update service information derived from the operation of the agents. This information is used to redefine the agents and to reallocate resources for correcting failures and to meet the requirements of a defined service more precisely.
An application or service in a multi-agent system is mapped as a series of calls amongst agents to perform the service. Each agent specifies its type, quantity and quality of service (QoS) in order to provide for an overall application. Since multi-agent systems are implemented in an open environment, no agent has prior knowledge of any other agent. The only knowledge that an agent possesses is its requirements and capabilities to provide a specific type of service. Thus, an agent may be required to find other agents to fulfill certain of its service requirements. A calling agent (referred to herein as a Bid Manager) sends out a bid for services to a plurality of called agents (referred to herein as Bidders), each of whom may be capable of providing the necessary resources for the Bid Manager to complete its task. The Bid Manager receives and evaluates the bids from the various Bidders and selects the agent which has the best chance of success in performing the requested service. This is referred to herein as selecting the xe2x80x9clowest bidxe2x80x9d.
One example of a classic bidding mechanism of the foregoing type is disclosed in commonly owned U.S. Pat. No. 5,675,636 entitled Adaptive Method of Allocating Calls.
A problem with multi-agent bidding systems, such as discussed above, is that QoS is not normally taken into consideration in evaluating bids from the bidding agents. Thus, whereas a certain resource (e.g. long distance carrier) may present a low bid in terms of actual cost per call, it may suffer from undesirable bandwidth restrictions or failure rates which are not reflected in the bid. A Bid Manager may be well advised to enter into a contract with another Bidder which presents a higher cost bid but whose QoS is significantly higher.
According to the present invention, a system is provided for automatically monitoring and learning the QoS of each Bidder and incorporating the QoS into the cost of the bids (i.e. a poor performance leads to a lesser value of the bid).